A Hike across the Pinehurst Plateau

Dear Diary,

From downtown Lake City I headed south along Lake City Way NE.  My first destination was a Natural Area on that road that, like Flicker Haven, gets ignored by mappers.  Like most Natural Areas in North Seattle, it's in a lowland, but as I learnt while working on the page about the South Fork of Thornton Creek, a page of "Land and Water" I haven't actually written in you yet, the land goes uphill from it not because of a hill, but because of an eastward salient, between the North and South Forks of Thornton Creek, of the plateau that dominates north-central Seattle.  This eastern mini-plateau is essentially what's under the Pinehurst neighbourhood, so, since I don't know it to have its own name, the choice is pretty obvious.

Oh, and although I got all that from a topographical map, in fact that walk Monday evening did entail going uphill, walking on the flat a long way, and then going downhill.  Score one for cartographers!

This is the least compact hike I've taken in this region, which is why the plateau is the only unifying thing I can think of.  Hubbard Homestead is relatively far from the other Northgate parks, Homewood Natural Area from the other Lake City ones, and the Pinehurst parks aren't all that close to anything.  This was, in other words, a real hike.

I took seventeen photos as I walked from that Natural Area to Hubbard Homestead north of Northgate, and Blogspot has apparently let me, this time, put them all in one page.

Map:

Homewood Natural Area

As I said, this one is ignored by the usual mappers - both Google Maps and Open Street Map just leave it blank (Open Street Map, which usually indicates woods, doesn't even do that there).  The Thornton Creek watershed map (PDF) includes it, though, and there's a Seattle city government page documenting a 2017 sweep (PDF), with lots of photos and a map.  Anyway, it's along the western side of Lake City Way about halfway down the block between NE 117th and 120th Streets.  It has one trail, which goes more or less straight down to the creek.

I haven't entirely ignored it, however; this is the only Natural Area in this region that I'd actually shown you pictures of already, dear Diary, in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!" last November, a picture of its sign and a picture of the North Fork there.  So this time I confined myself to one more photo of the creek:

and took a few random landscape shots:

Since this is the last we'll see of the North Fork in this region's hikes, dear Diary, I feel obligated to note that I still haven't figured out one parks department property listed in the 2020 real property report:  "Thornton Creek - North Branch - Part Esmt", property #416, 6 1/4 acres, supposed address Lake City Way NE.  Now, the thing is, the South Fork does run along LCW for a while, but the North Fork just crosses the street, where Homewood Natural Area is.  I don't know whether this means the city owns 6 1/4 acres specifically of the creek bed from Licorice Fern Natural Area to Homewood, which would explain why so much of that creek is daylit, or what exactly, and none of the maps I use shows this ostensible park.

Pinehurst Pocket Park

My first visit to this park was near or at night, and I was much impressed, but you, dear Diary, weren't to know it; in "Top of the City", part I I just called it "very pleasant" and moved on right away, never to mention it again for months.  So I imagine you were pretty surprised when in "What's in a Name?" I called it out as a quarter-acre or less park that I would've regretted not seeing.  I was kind of surprised too.  So I wasn't sure what to expect on returning.

Well, it isn't the perfect park, and the art I mentioned isn't great art.  But it is an interesting place to rest a bit, with interesting things to look at, which is all I needed that evening, and all I would imagine any of your readers would need to justify a visit.  It's certainly the boutique park of this general area.

I remembered art in a kiosk, which this page attests wasn't a bogus memory, but didn't find the kiosk this time.  What I did see is a sort of inlay in the pavement, sadly dirty after days without rain, but even so more effective than this photo can be:

For a much better photo, see this page, which credits an artist named Sara Mall Johani.  Apparently the inlays are actually meant to enable kids' games.

Also largely for the kids, and apparently also by Johani, a rather exotic model tractor, which the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation page says is in memory of a man who used to drive a steam tractor around the neighbourhood as recently as the 1960s:

The pages I read also credit Johani with pillars I haven't yet noticed.

The park's actual focus, according to the signage on the spot, is not artistic but environmental, so for people uninterested in art, there's that, and here's a landscape in which such people may be able to spot features that didn't interest me:

I was also amused by this:

So all in all, it was a satisfying, if not earth-shaking, reunion.

Pinehurst Playground

This is the only park in this page with public-facing plumbing - a water fountain, which I've found running on every visit so far, including Monday's:

It also has a sanican:

which the city's map of hygiene services persists in falsely claiming is ADA-compliant, although I told the map's makers otherwise months ago:

I've shown you, dear Diary, non-plumbing photos of this park before, well anyway one or two, so this time I photographed the playground:

a grill in front of the baseball field:

and a miscellaneous landscape:

As usual when I've visited, the basketball half-court was too busy to photograph.  I'm starting to think half-courts are probably more common in North Seattle parks than either full courts, or the hoops alone that I thought the norm.

Pinehurst P-Patch

This P-Patch is on the more or less flat, thankfully:

but has somewhat confused signage:

Northgate Pump Station

This Seattle Public Utilities facility is a working one, is not one of their parks, and there's no public access inside the building, but they did put a sign out front, and also parkified the premises quite a bit, so I took one picture:

Note, though, Seattle City Light is, despite its do-gooding, much less of a public-facing landowner, and I would not photograph - have on my last hike not photographed - a Seattle City Light building closed to the public but with similarly parklike landscaping.

Hubbard Homestead

Way back in January, in "Hike 1A", part II, I promised this park, for services abundantly rendered, a full treatment.  But I reached it after sunset, which was hardly the ideal time to try to grok a park.  So I only took one photo as testimony that I hadn't forgotten the promise:

and in fact came back Wednesday.  So assuming I return OK from the errands I have planned for the next few hours, I hope to keep that promise tonight, as the second page I write in you about the Wednesday hikes, dear Diary.  Until then!